UNA Music Faculty Member Wins National Competition, Festival Performance
Mar. 19, 2025
Michelle R. Eubanks , UNA, at meubanks@una.edu, 256.765.4392
FLORENCE, AL – Dr. Martin Hebel, music composition and theory faculty member at UNA, has won a national composition competition and was selected as a featured composer for the 2025 Hot Air Music Festival at the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM).
As a featured composer at the festival, Dr. Hebel collaborated with Dr. William Hueholt, UNA’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Piano, who performed the West Coast premier of Dr. Hebel’s award-winning solo piano composition Radiant Pillars at the 2025 Hot Air Music Festival earlier this month.
“Radiant Pillars, the composition selected for exhibition, is a significant single-movement composition for solo piano, 12 minutes in duration, as it displays the performer’s virtuosity and expression,” said Dr. Hebel. “Radiant Pillars also evokes the spirit of discovery and curiosity. It is a musical reflection on two scientific observations which extend to our understanding of the universe: the Hubble telescope image, “Pillars of Creation,” showing stars forming from massive clouds of gas and dust, and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the edge of the universe still expanding from the Big Bang.”
Dr. Hebel has received national recognition for Radiant Pillars,” including being named 2024 National Finalist for two American prizes. Additionally, he received international recognition for the orchestra version of Radiant Pillars. As a winner of the prestigious ACO EarShot program, I collaborated with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to premier the orchestra version at Cincinnati Music Hall in October 2023, mentored by Pulitzer Prize winner Melinda Wagner, Grammy-nominated ACO Artistic Director Curtis Stewart, and Barlow Prize winner Texu Kim.
About The University of North Alabama
The University of North Alabama is an accredited, comprehensive regional state university offering undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degree programs through the colleges of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering; the Sanders College of Business and Technology; Education and Human Sciences; and the Anderson College of Nursing and Health Professions. Occupying a 130-acre campus in a residential section of Florence, Alabama, UNA is located within a four-city area that also includes Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. UNA Athletics, a renowned collegiate athletics program with seven (7) Division II National Championships, is now a proud member of NCAA Division I as part of the Atlantic Sun and United Athletic conferences. The University of North Alabama is an equal opportunity institution and does not discriminate in the admission policy on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, disability, age, or national origin. For more: una.edu and una.edu/unaworks/.